At the same time, reviews are the most useful source of insights for product and marketing teams. Why? Well, first of all, they are voluntarily shared in a free text format, which makes reviews one of the few marketing data sources that are really unbiased. Reviews also give an honest representation of customer satisfaction levels. So…if someone tells you that people leave reviews only if they are extremely happy or unhappy, tell them that is not true. In fact, the majority of reviews are positive, with star ratings ranging between 3.5 and 4.5 points.

I can imagine that your next question at this point is “how do I get enough reviews and start benefit from it”?

Having customers to write reviews is difficult, so if you’re not successful at it, we understand. Only 10% of customers write reviews every now and then. Only 1% does it frequently.

Based on the experience at Wonderflow,we can tell you that the minimum number of reviews that you need to increase learnings and sales, is around one hundred and fifty, per each product or service obviously. If only 10% of customers write reviews, it means that you would need to sell more than 1500 units of a product to generate the bare minimum of 150 reviews. That’s a huge number, isn’t it? So how can we maximize the sales we make and get several reviews?

You can do two things:

Number One: create opportunities for customers to write reviews. It seems too obvious to be true? Trust me if I say that the number one reason for companies not to get reviews is because it’s actually difficult to leave one. It should be possible to leave reviews on your website, through links on social profiles, on your app, if you have it. A simple, and smart solution would be to add a widget to your product pages, nothing special, just a simple form with the star rating and free text.

Number Two: ask customers to write reviews. Timing is key in this case, as you don’t want to ask them to write a review too early, when they haven’t used the product yet, or too late when they almost forgot about it. Sending them an email, or a message are the most common ways to do so, however, it’s also successful to give them a call to ask about their experience. Customers would be impressed by the attention that you may have for their satisfaction. You have nothing to lose, but if you don’t reach out to them, only a few would write a review.